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MONTREAL—There are advantages and disadvantages to having a competitive leadership campaign such as the one the NDP is undergoing, and keeping them in balance is a very tough act.

On the plus side, the thousands of members who are voting between now and March 24 are doing so with their eyes wide open and under no delusions that there is a risk-free choice on offer.

A vote for Nathan Cullen is a vote for an attempt at cooperation with the Liberals in the 2015 campaign. But there is no guarantee that the electoral coalition he is promoting would help oust the Conservatives from power or that the Liberals would even consider it.

Thomas Mulcair wants to rebrand the party along lines that would almost certainly see it sail in uncharted waters. Jack Layton effectively began to move the party closer to the centre but he, in contrast to Mulcair, enjoyed the confidence of party elders such as Ed Broadbent. Winning on an outsider ticket can carry a heavy post-convention price tag.

Choosing Brian Topp would mean making do with an interim parliamentary leader for at least a few more months and possibly longer. An Ekos poll published Friday showed the NDP on the rise in British Columbia (where the provincial party is leading in voting intentions) but losing ground to the Bloc Québécois in Quebec. Topp’s promise to seek a seat in that province could be difficult to fulfill.

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There have been plenty of red flags raised over Paul Dewar’s halting French and based on his performance at the next-to-last official debate of the campaign in Montreal on the weekend their numbers are not about to diminish.

As the campaign enters the home stretch, the more bilingual Peggy Nash remains as profile-challenged in Quebec as on the day she launched her bid last fall. The NDP would face a very tall order selling either Dewar or Nash as a substitute to Layton in Quebec.

The downside to a competitive campaign is that there comes at time when one or more contenders come to the conclusion that only a take-no-prisoner approach will ensure a coveted spot on the final leadership ballot.

In the last leg of this campaign, that is primarily translating into going after perceived front-runner Thomas Mulcair.

At Sunday’s debate, Topp warned that Mulcair’s centrist compass would lead the party astray and off the path to power.

Niki Ashton questioned his loyalty to NDP principles.

Nash suggested that he had not been contributing his share to the party’s national coffers.

Dewar all but said outright that if he won, he would not keep Mulcair as his deputy leader or as his Quebec lieutenant.

It is almost certainly too late to cut deeply into Mulcair’s first ballot support but it is not too early to try to freeze him at the current level.

Failure to grow after the first ballot is what killed Michael Ignatieff’s bid at the 2006 Liberal convention.

In the days leading up to the leadership vote, his opponents successfully turned his advocacy of the recognition of the Quebec nation, his initial support of the U.S-led Iraq war and his vote for an extension of the Canadian deployment in Afghanistan into a leadership glass ceiling.

As an aside, at least Ignatieff’s opponents went after him on meaty policy issues. By comparison, Sunday’s NDP debate — officially devoted to the “building a strong united Canada” — featured one of the most vacuous political conversations ever held on this defining topic among would-be candidates for the role of prime minister.

In politics, a suspenseful race always draws a larger audience than a coronation and the NDP and at this point suspense may be all that this extra-long campaign still has going for it.

But the narrower the victory, the more fences to mend on the morning after.

Judging from the lack of love on offer on the stage of the Montreal debate, Mulcair — should he win the leadership on March 24 — should not expect much of a honeymoon with his party.

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